Users and Usage of the Digital Library of Budva
Abstract
In 2018, the Public Library of Budva decided to start building a digital library with the desire to expand the existing offer of online services and meet the needs of the modern audience that is increasingly using digital content. Sometime after launching the Digital Library of Budva (DLB) in November 2019, two issues naturally have raised, asking for evidence-based answers: the effectiveness of invested resources and the direction of the further development. Although the content is locally oriented, the hypothesis was that this new channel of presentation would attract audiences from a far wider geographical area. This hypothesis is confirmed, as well as the empirical observations that there is a direct and high correlation between the number of sessions and presence at social and other media, and that users are inclined to access the DLB via mobile devices, behaving more like sightseers than attentive readers. The analysis of web traffic during one year was performed using Google Analytics.
The main aim of the analysis was to get a clear insight into the structure, interests, and behavior of users. It was supposed to be a base for achieving all the defined goals – increasing the number of users, acquiring regular users, extending sessions, and increasing the number of digital unit downloads. Despite limitations in the author’s specific knowledge of webometrics and the possibilities of Google Analytics, and the short period that was being analyzed, the results and conclusions are valuable for determining the main directions of the future DLB development policy.
The analysis has shown three main areas as the most important to pay attention to – expanding the offer of digital content with visual materials, a greater presence in the media and on social networks, and popularization of DLB in places of professional and scientific communication. Achieving better results in these three areas would help justify all the mentioned reasons for creating the Digital Library.
